where the only curriculum is kissing,
love is the first day of sun
after a whole winter of rain,
love is a secret thicket of small trees
just outside of town,
love is how you are born,
love is how you ruin your life.
So when people ask, I want to tell them
that whatever this was,
it definitely wasn’t that.
Jenny Arnold Is Going to Kill You
If there was a list of stupid things to do, flirting with
Jenny Arnold’s boyfriend would be smack-dab at the
tippy-top. Denise tells you the word is out: Jenny
Arnold is going to kill you the day you hit high school.
She tells you that Jenny Arnold says this summer is your
last, so you’d better enjoy it.
The next time you see Jenny Arnold’s boyfriend, he
doesn’t look at you. You stare at him through the
window of junior high, the one that looks out on the
rest of your life, and you realize this is the first boy
you’re going to die for, and if you live through the
summer, it probably won’t be the last.
2
low tide
June 9
It’s the first day of summer and
the sun rises like a giant, dumb saucer.
I take the dogs and
sit outside in the gory heat
waiting for Tara to come home
and face all the trouble that can’t help
but flare up around her.
She’s been out all night
and I try to picture what she was doing and with whom,
but it’s about as easy as trying to picture
dying or being born.
The heat is starting to slap me around now
and after I fill the dog dishes with water,
I sit there and wonder
if there will ever be a mystery inside of me
like there is inside my sister—
something bright and fast and wonderful,
something awful and true, something
that cannot be stamped out
no matter how many ways
our father tries to stamp it out.
Summer has lost all control of itself
when Tara’s car pulls in the drive.
Our father waits at the door for her,
fighting the heat.
My sister gets out and gives me a little wave
before she goes to face him,
and I sit there,
waiting for the noise to start,
watching as the dogs run wild around the yard,
eating things that will make them sick later,
bringing back things the rest of us thought
were long since buried and gone.
Visiting South
Every July my sister goes
to be a camp counselor
and I get sent south,
away from the sea and the pines
and to the flat land of boy cousins
and tumbleweeds.
Even though we’re too old for it
the boy cousins and I play marbles all summer long,
the banter of glass globes
in the lap of my summer dresses.
Always, the sex of cousins smells sharper
than that of the boys back home,
especially this summer,
the summer before high school,
with the liquid flood of marbles all around,
the print of lineoleum on my cheek,
the beer bread crumbs
dug in my knees.
This must be the start of the sweet and hungry days,
out here in the overgrown acres of forever
with the boy cousins,
because I feel like soon I will taste sin firsthand
and maybe even the way I smile, or walk,
even the way I roll the marbles
across that endless floor,
will surely give me away.
The Postcard I Imagine My Sister Writes from Camp
There’s a guy here who looks just like you, Bobby.
He’s got sideburns and a sunburn. He’s a loser and a
sycophant. Trouble is, he says the most beautiful things,
walks the most beautiful walk. First day I saw him,
I thought, There he is, the fool I’ll fall for. He calls
Tamakwa “summer camp for the hormonally insane.”
He thinks he’s clever and oh my God, he is. He’s not
wasteful like you are, he doesn’t waste my time with
stories about cousins or killers. The stories he tells, they
get right to the point, like a dog’s nose to a crotch.
Your stories never had much of a point and if they did,
I never understand how you got to it. This guy, he’s
special in a stupid kind of way. He knows how not
to hurt me, he knows how to bring up his girlfriend
casually in conversation, he knows better than to lay
himself in front of me and hold out a hand that could
mean either “Stop” or “Come Closer.”.
Wedding Day
My sister and I come home to find
that our father has spawned with Susan,
his bride-to-be that wants to get married at sea.
I’m in the catch and release program,
she likes to say, thinking it’s funny
that she’s had more boyfriends
than there are salmon in the jetty these days.
As we’re motoring out to the harbor,
I look at my father, cheeks flushed,
new wedding ring burning a hole in his pocket.
As he steers us across the shallow part of the shoal,
I try not to think of my mother,
instead I look at my sister,
who’s wearing Bobby’s leather jacket
and not even trying to hide her latest hickey,
and Susan, the brand-new bride
who is tagging my father with a kiss and a vow
before one day she releases him
back into the wild.
Stepbrother
One day he was a kid three grades below me,
and the next we’re related.
He’s more disgusting than the parts of a fish
you throw in the trash.
Fortunately, he doesn’t say much to me,
except for pass that at the dinner table
or are you finished? when referring to the bathroom
or food of yours he wants to eat.
He’s always down at the docks,
collecting marine life, the kind that stinks when it dies.
His glasses are big like goggles
and for a person I’d prefer knowing nothing about,
why do I have to accidentally see him naked at least
once a month?
His mother is always saying how
he needs a positive male role model
and I agree.
He’s in desperate need of a dad
but one thing’s for sure:
he’s not getting mine.
Happy Birthday
Randall Faber called me today to wish me a happy
birthday and I said thank you and he asked me what’d
you do? and I told him I went to North Carolina to see
my relatives and when I got back I had a whole new
family. Actually, I didn’t say that last part.
Randall told me he spent his summer building an
add-on to his kitchen with his dad and his brothers.
Also, he got a new dog.
I picture the Faber family—a gang of boys and a mom
that makes the meals and a dinner table full of people
that know how to love each other in a regular way.
asks how Elaine is and I say we’re not really friends
anymore, and he asks how Denise is, and I say I’d
rather not talk about it and then we say goodbye,
and that’s it.
Denise
Denise is sick in the head
and has been since June,
when she killed something for the first time.
Her father gave her traps for the kitchen and den
and orchestrated their placement,
as if he were back in Da Nang,
festooning the forest with a collar of landmines.
I was sleeping over
the night he gave out the orders,
and in the morning, we collected the bodies
and bagged them before breakfast—
three rigid mice and one warm one,
soft and barely bleeding,
fresh from the thunder of running from cats.
We took them out to the trash
and there, under the rotting elm,
Denise’s sobs were the sound of a prom dress
being taken off in a parking lot—
slick and satiny and torn.
Her father, all bourbon eyes and confiscated heart,
didn’t like tears
and refused us food
until they were dry and gone.
Now, Denise can’t wait to kill things.
Last week, slain beasts were taking the form of
cats and squirrels, then birds and bees,
and now she’s got her sights on
boys from the neighborhood and beyond,
some of them so big they could only be called men.
She’s ready for them all to fall down, one by one,
until the town is littered with creatures
whose hearts she’s broken,
with me, faithful witness, following just behind,
tagging the bodies
so the next of kin
can always be notified.
Perfect
Today is my fifteenth birthday
so Tara is playing the part of Perfect Sister,
beautiful on the half-shell,
experienced but never vampy.
Oh, I know, she has her problems:
the way she couldn’t stop knitting
that scarf for Susan for Christmas
(it just grew and grew, an avenue of red yarn),
the broken curfews, the pregnancy scare,
the tendency to do everything
everyone tells her not to do.
But all in all, she’s a pretty picture,
teeth white as the sky,
eyes marshy and green as Florida.
With her lipstick that matches the moon,
she’s telling loaves of lies,
saying she never starts fights,
saying she’s gained weight, really she has.
She goes on and on,
sipping from a bottle of something
swiped from the berth below
and leaning against me in quieter moments,
whispering I love you as we round the point,
just before Dad drops the mainsail
and with the sure hand of a father,
takes us back to shore.
Favorite Foods
When we get home from our sail,
all sunburned and salty,
I walk into my room
and find a boy I barely know
reading my diary.
He’s got it open to my list of Favorite Foods
(I told you my diary was stupid)
and I scream What are you doing?!
My stepbrother leaps up and runs out
and I slam the door in his face
and after a moment I hear him say,
like tacos, too.
But when I open the door, he’s gone.
To the Grave
Don’t tell Elaine, Denise says
when she shows me the medication the doctor
put her on.
Don’t tell Denise, Elaine says
during the only phone call we have all summer,
the one where she brags about having sex with
Stan Bondurant.
Don’t tell my mom, my stepbrother says
after I catch him feeding a stray cat
outside our house.
I’m usually not a person people trust with their secrets
but in two weeks school starts
and it’s obvious to everyone that after that,
the only place I’ll be taking those secrets
is to the grave.
Labor Day
The harbor is alive with motors
and the sun is shining or something like it
and the Sound is full of jellyfish
and the gulls are flirting with their catch
before they come to kill it.
I am down at the dock
trying with all my might
to stop summer from ending
and so is Larry in slip 15
who’s had enough of his life
so he just drinks his way through it,
or the guy who lives on the tugboat
that my stepmom says might sink,
but no matter what, the spangle and spell of school
is coming for me like a tide I can’t stop,
it’s coming for me like a storm off the coast,
it’s coming for me like a spark that sets the
forest aflame
and while all the girls are like bulbs about to bloom,
me, I am trying to stay dug down in the dirt
because I know what is waiting for me
when I come out.
3
the lay of the land
The First Day of High School
Don’t ask me why, but
I’ve decided that being afraid of Jenny Arnold
is more powerful than being in love.
Love isn’t five feet nine like Jenny Arnold is.
Love doesn’t drive a lime green Barracuda the way
Jenny Arnold does.
And love won’t kill you like Jenny Arnold will.
On the drive to school, I ask my sister
if she’ll protect me from what’s about to happen.
My sister just laughs.
She can’t wait for me to die so she can get my room.
When we get to school,
everyone is having the time of their goddamn lives
and all I can think about is my funeral.
I’m on my way into second period gym
and that’s when I see Jenny Arnold
standing in the locker room,
wearing nothing but her underwear and a rose tattoo
on her hip—
a thorny invitation to sniff
and get pricked.
Jenny Arnold doesn’t care who sees her and why
should she?
She’s a rock star in a room full of doofs,
she’s done things the rest of us have never even
read about.
She walks towards me, topless and queenly and
I realize I’ve been dreaming about getting hit by
Jenny Arnold
all summer long, the way some girls dream about
getting kissed.
Suddenly, I can’t wait for the punch;
at least I’m going to die at the hand
of someone who’s beautiful and cool.
I close my eyes and wait
to get smacked, but instead
Jenny Arnold smiles and says,
Welcome to high school
and then she walks away,
heading toward the showers
like a flower blooming towards the rain
and for no reason at all,
I go from feeling cursed to blessed,
because like any goddess on high,
/> Jenny Arnold has the gift of taking life
and she has the gift of giving it back.
Just Friends
Why I have to have a locker right next to Randall Faber,
I will never know.
Every day I see him and we pretend like it’s normal
like we’re “just friends”
except inside I feel kind of sick,
knowing that no matter how old I get,
Randall Faber will always be my first kiss,
my first beginning, my first end.
I guess the upside is that
now I’m a woman with a past,
I’m not all present and future like I used to be
and maybe that’s a good thing
if it weren’t so absolutely awful.
Biology
Some people are only happy if they are making your life
miserable and Mr. Horter is one of them. He enjoys the
torture of frogs and freshmen. His life is sure to be
awful, because his head is pointy and he is cruel and
his pants are weird. He is destined to a life with a wife
who (I’ve seen her) is as mean as he is. I imagine them
kissing each other at the door when he comes home.
Then I try to imagine him getting her pregnant (which
she is) and all I can imagine is two people bumping up
against each other in a pitch-black room. I don’t know
what my life holds, but if it’s anything like Mr. Horter’s,
I don’t want it. What I’d like to know is, shouldn’t they
have teachers that inspire you to grow up, instead of
people whose lives seem to say, Stop now because it’s
never going to get any better?
Erosion
Denise and Elaine don’t talk at all anymore.
They are like that cliff in town,
the one that’s sliding into the sea.
Geologists say the erosion was inevitable.
Nothing could stop it,
not with the rain and the wind the way it is.
Whether it’s soil or best friends,
things can’t help but slip away and disappear.
I guess nothing on the map ever stays fixed.
All you can do is make sure you’re not standing on it
when it goes.
My Mother at Fifteen
I don’t know much about my mother, just that she had
wanderlust all her life, even at fifteen, with her lipstick
The Geography of Girlhood Page 3